A slight ache

This was all a few weeks back...

It kind of snuck up on me sometime near mid-weekend-morning, more or less around the time I was finishing the paper and just starting to chastise myself for being such a lazy bastard as to have not started work yet.

At first it didn’t hurt.

Well, not exactly.

It was more like a complete absence of feeling, of sensation. It was a numbness born in the tips of my fingers that inched its life across the back of my hand.
Without realising it, I’d started giving my hand a shake, every-so-often, to try and jump-start it. After a few weeks it began to spread further up my arm and then, on occasions, it would be a fragmentary burst of white pain from nail to shoulder.

Usually, though, it was simply like my arm was grumbling for a divorce from the rest of my body and I tried not to grant it much attention.

It always seemed to feel a bit worse, a little more urgent, when I’d had a lot to drink the night before. Perhaps, it was just my sharpened nerve ends buzzing.

Or perhaps it wasn’t.

‘Probably ought to cut down,’ I muttered one Sunday swallowing two dry aspirins.

Sometimes it would help if I carried my arm across my chest in a imaginary sling, resting whatever had muscles were complaining so vigorously. Yet, there was something about it that just didn’t feel physical. I couldn’t identify a pattern that would explain it away like dust. So I wondered if it was a ghost pain, something from somewhere else.

Finally, one Saturday afternoon, it seemed to reach out beyond my shoulder and poured like superheated oil into my chest cavity.

‘What in the hell is wrong with me?’ I asked the yucca plant as there was no-one else to talk to.

It wouldn’t shake off. It was like an alien sprain that needed stretching out, but if I strained it too hard then there was the nagging suspicion that something else would instantly snap. Through my hung-over eyes it all seemed worse. It was the impending lightning strike that would leave me writhing on the floor.

A tiny, tiny voice in the back of my head wondered if I was having a heart attack.

I began to worry about keeling over in the flat. Alone. Isolated. Unable to call for help. No-one to know what had happened.

So, I took myself out and wandered the streets of Brockley, down into New Cross, onto Deptford and all the way round again. Walking myself into a self-replicating circle, my thoughts empty for once as I kidded myself that if I did collapse in the street then anyone would even offer a glance.

The exercise seemed to help, but there was still an unending stiffness.

On the Monday morning a contraption had been installed at someone’s desk. A keyboard seemingly broken in half, standing upright on its tips like at arching bridge across a watery steel square. Clipped into the rim of the desk were two curved spring brackets like I imagine the controls of a starfighter wired to your central cortex would be.

‘What’s all this malarkey?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s because I get RSI. It’s to support and adapt my posture.’

Repetitive Strain Injury.

Idiot.

So, I hadn’t been nearly dying of some alcohol induced nerve system collapse. Now, that my self-diagnosis took a calmer, more reflective approach I was able to identify when it was straining, at what angle the twinges were worse. I’ve never had a job before where I spend ninety-nine percent of my time at the computer, twiddling a mouse around. Even before I was out selling space on the road my computer work was essentially punctuations for telephone calls. Plus, I’ve been spending three or four hours every evening and most weekends writing - of course it’s bloody RSI.

Pillock.

Since then I’ve been adjusting my mouse usage, being certain of how I sit in the chair, dropping my fingers down onto the keys rather than reaching up and, thanks to a last week my flat being a technology-free zone due to the motherboard imploding, it’s started to feel a lot better.

My arm loves me again.

Now, if I can just work out whether I’m suffering from occasional bouts of IBS, a possible tape-worm, dodgy cooking or the first trappings of bowel cancer then I’ll be on my way back to normality.






Some of this blog may have been exaggerated.